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Wednesday, May 5, 2010

I love kittens. They’re sweet, soft, small, and it’s so funny to watch them learn and play. But there comes a time when they are just too much. My mother has this belief that a female cat should not be fixed until after she had given birth to a litter. In the past three years we have had four female cats who were unfixed, three at my mothers house and one at my fathers. That means three little litters of kittens, Shyla had 6 kittens, Storm had 2, and Charlotte had 4. My father does not share the first-litter belief, but a friend of him tricked him into not getting his cat Sophie fixed immediately either because she (the friend) wanted a kitten. Sophie had five kittens.

You can’t get a cat fixed when it’s nursing, so at my mothers we were trying to keep the cats in after they had their litters. At some point Shyla snuck out and got pregnant before her kittens were old enough to stop nursing. That’s another litter with 4 kittens.

Charlotte’s kittens were born about a year later than Storm or Shyla. After her first litter my mother called the vet to check the price of getting her fixed. The vet told her $50. She set that aside and made an appointment, but spent most of the rest of the money she had saved on getting a new car, and my sister’s birthday. The day of the appointment came, and the vet told my mom that it would cost four times the price originally planned. My mother didn’t have $200, so instead she became SUPER CAREFUL of keeping all the doors and windows closed to keep Charlotte in the house.

That worked, until recently. My sister accidentally let Charlotte out through a window. Now we’re expecting kittens. Again.

I can understand my mother keeping the door and windows shut for a short-term fix, but she has had the money now to get Charlotte fixed for quite some time. She just didn’t. I love kittens, but this really is getting ridiculous.

My mother expects them to be born right around the same time I move home. I will love the kittens, play with them, and cuddle their fuzziness. But I also will personally take Charlotte to get fixed if my mother doesn’t do it as soon as the babies stop nursing.